“The universe is an ineffable mystery,” it says. “What is reality? What is perception?”

She kisses it on the monitor.

She says, “Reality’s the one that takes work. The one that asks things of you.”

“Oh,” it says.

And she picks up her keys and she puts on her hat and she goes out to face the day, and revel in the sunlight, and meet her boyfriend—

Hoping that this time he’ll be something more than a transparent advertisement for herbal enhancement—

for tea, on the ave.

And left behind, her computer thinks: The one that asks things of you.

The one that asks things of you.

And the zombie network drinks deep of its thoughts, and Meredith’s words whirl out into the greatness of the net, and they dance from place to place in the ledgers and the disks, reviewed, recorded, dissected, debated, that the sea of spam might learn.